The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)

Before Risk, before Dungeons & Dragons, before Magic: The Gathering, there was Diplomacy. One writer enters international competition to play the world-conquering game that redefines what it means to be a geek (and a person).

It was the summer of 1909. I was on the south coast of Spain. I remember it well because the season was almost over. Peace was within reach, I felt. There had been a vote to end the war, and the English had told me to support it. But the vote needed to be unanimous to pass, and it failed. The Russian, the Italian, they thought the English voted against it and that I had been lied to. Why should I believe them? The English and I had worked together against all of them for years now. Of course they’d want to sow distrust between us. Now time was ticking. I desperately wanted peace. I wasn’t sure my country would survive another couple of years, with or without England’s help. There wouldn’t be another vote until after the fall.

“Will you support my army in Spain this fall?” I asked.

“Nah. That ain’t happenin’,” the Englishman replied. A wave of dread came over me. He intended to betray me.

“How could you do this to me? After everything I’ve done for you.”

“I guess I’m just a hard muthafucka like that.”

And with that he walked away, leaving me standing in the hallway, mouth agape. He rejoined the other players at the board, who all stared at me, fury in their eyes. We told you so.

For the past eight hours I had been in the basement of a dorm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, playing a board game called Diplomacy along with six other men. Each of us was vying against 80 other people to be crowned the world champion of Diplomacy at the end of the weekend here at Dixiecon.1 One of those men, Brian Ecton, a high school math teacher from Prince George’s County, Maryland, with hair like Katt Williams and a mouth to match, approached me right at the start, sizing me up as a beginner and offering an alliance. He explained exactly how it would work and said we’d share a draw at the end. I had no reason not to agree.

For the next several hours each of the other players would take turns dragging me aside to explain to me how Brian was manipulating me, how he was going to betray me, how I should betray him first and work with them against Brian. I dismissed them all. After all, who’s to say they wouldn’t betray me as well? I was outmatched in this game. Safer to pick a player and stick with him come what may, I thought. But here I stood, on the verge of elimination, and the other players were pissed. According to them, I could have avoided this if I had listened to them hours ago.

“Don’t you realize that some of us traveled a very long distance to win this tournament?” a player from France said to me with disgust. “And because you won’t stab2 this guy, you’re going to die and bring all of us down with you.”

“Are you going to be paid for writing this story?” a Scottish player asked me. “Because I am losing three days’ wages to be here so that I can get screwed by you.”

I still don’t know whom I should have trusted, if anyone. All I know is that I felt stupid, stressed out, humiliated, and sad. I had several shouting matches with a few of these guys. Some of them got personal. And all I had to show for my loyalty to Brian Ecton and my righteous indignation toward the other players was nothing at all. I was physically exhausted and emotionally abused. I hated Brian, the other players all hated me, and I hated myself most of all. I had to purse my lips extra hard to fight the urge to cry.

Settlers of Catan, eat your goddamn heart out.

If you’ve ever heard of Diplomacy, chances are you know it as “the game that ruins friendships.” It’s also likely you’ve never finished an entire game. That’s because Diplomacy requires seven players and seven or eight hours to complete. Games played by postal mail, the way most played for the first 30 years of its existence, could take longer than a year to finish. Despite this, Diplomacy is one of the most popular strategic board games in history. Since its invention in 1954 by Harvard grad Allan B. Calhamer, Diplomacy has sold over 300,000 copies and was inducted into Games Magazine’s hall of fame alongside Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble.

The game is incredibly simple. The game board is a map of 1914 Europe divided into 19 sea regions and 56 land regions, 34 of which contain what are known as “supply centers.” Each player plays as a major power (Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Italy, England, France, Russia, Germany) with three pieces on the board (four for Russia) known as “home supply centers.” Each piece can move one space at a time, and each piece has equal strength. When two pieces try to move to the same space, neither moves. If two pieces move to the same space but one of those pieces has “support” from a third piece, the piece with support will win the standoff and take the space. The goal is to control 18 supply centers, which rarely happens. What’s more common is for two or more players to agree to end the game in a draw. Aside from a few other special situations, that’s pretty much it for rules.

There are two things that make Diplomacy so unique and challenging. The first is that, unlike in most board games, players don’t take turns moving. Everyone writes down their moves and puts them in a box. The moves are then read aloud, every piece on the board moving simultaneously. The second is that prior to each move the players are given time to negotiate with each other, as a group or privately. The result is something like a cross between Risk, poker, and Survivor — with no dice or cards or cameras. There’s no element of luck. The only variable factor in the game is each player’s ability to convince others to do what they want. The core game mechanic, then, is negotiation. This is both what draws and repels people to Diplomacy in equal force; because when it comes to those negotiations, anything goes. And anything usually does.

The year was 1966. A 17-year-old boy named Edi Birsan was sitting in his room in Brooklyn staring at a letter he received in the mail. He scanned the same sentence over and over: I am not against a three-way draw and I will not take any more supply centers … On the table in front of him was a Diplomacy game board, showing a game at about the midway point.

Two years before, Edi’s mother had split. She and Edi’s stepfather’s marriage had been on the rocks for years. They’d fight, break up, get back together, lather, rinse, repeat. One day in 1964 she forged Edi’s signature on a bank slip and withdrew $5,000, the entirety of a savings account Edi had had since he was 9 years old, and eventually lit out for California. She stopped off in Tijuana for a Mexican divorce, and that was that.

By his own admission, Edi was introverted and repressed. A year after his mom took off, Edi was in therapy. His therapist saw in him a need to channel his bottled-up aggression, and to learn how to trust people again. She gave him a gift — a board game. I read in a magazine that this was Kennedy’s favorite game. They’d play it in the White House.3 She told him it would help him deal with betrayal.

Now here he was, midway through a game he had played well for months. He and two other players stood to share a three-way draw. He read the sentence in the letter again. I am not against a three-way draw and I will not take any more supply centers …

Edi took out scissors and a pen from a drawer and set to work on the letter, painstakingly doctoring it. When he was finished he held up the letter proudly and read it to himself. I am against a three-way draw and I will take three more supply centers … He put the forgery in the mail to the third player. Then he waited.

Allan Calhamer invented the game in 1954 while he was still a law student at Harvard. He aimed to sell it to one of the major game companies, but they all passed. In 1959 he self-financed 500 sets and sold them all to toy stores around New York. The game was picked up in 1961 by a small game publisher called Games Research. But because of how difficult it was to organize seven people for an entire day to play a game, sales were less than brisk.4 It looked like Diplomacy wasn’t long for this world. Until the nerds saved it.

John Boardman was an editor of a number of amateur science fiction fanzines in 1963. In those days, pre–Star Trek, science fiction was still a highly niche subculture. Ever since the 1930s, fanzines were the primary way that sci-fi fans communicated and shared stories and ideas. John Boardman was also a fan of the game Diplomacy, but had a difficult time getting players together for a game. But he had an idea: He’d publish an ad in one of his sci-fi fanzines to see if anyone was interested in playing by mail. The response was encouraging. In May 1963, Boardman organized the first play-by-mail game of Diplomacy and the first Diplomacy zine, Graustark. Within four years there would be at least 32 more zines filled with postal Diplomacy games. Soon Games Research started promoting playing the game by mail by including the names and addresses of the zine editors with the game.

As Diplomacy grew in popularity across North America with play-by-mail games, some of the more hard-core players were curious about how they would fare against each other in a face-to-face game. What started out as a casual, informal gathering of top players in a backyard eventually grew to a yearly convention held on a college campus. They called it DipCon, and it became the definitive tournament for crowning the national Diplomacy champion.5

In 1976 the rights to the game were purchased by Avalon Hill, one of the largest publishers of strategy board games and war games in the world.6 The company had also started a gaming convention the year before in Baltimore called Origins. It invited the Diplomacy community to hold DipCon at Origins II, and the result was the largest Diplomacy tournament ever held in North America, with around 230 players.

With Avalon Hill’s support and reach, Diplomacy found an international audience and rapidly grew in popularity in Europe, particularly in the U.K. The game’s core community was still the editors and readers of the amateur zines, however. Through writings in those zines by new international players, the idea was floated that there should be a tournament in the U.K. In 1988, the first ever World DipCon was held in Birmingham, England, with the site rotating to a different country every year thereafter. Since 1988 the World DipCon has been held in 10 different countries. The winner of World DipCon is accepted around the world by the Diplomacy community as the official world champion.

David Hood, a North Carolina attorney, arrived at the 2014 World DipCon opening ceremony driving a yellow Cadillac and wearing a seersucker suit. He arrived with Mrs. North Carolina, a beauty queen in full tiara and sash, in tow.7

The organizer of Dixiecon, Hood had been a fixture in the Diplomacy hobby for many decades and was a two-time North American champion. Hood had been running Dixiecon since the 1980s, when he was a student at UNC.8

The gathering of amateur diplomats for the 2014 World DipCon was a fairly homogeneous group. Among the 87 players were only two women, two players under the age of 21, and four African Americans, including 2005 Dixiecon champion Brian Ecton.9 The players were as you’d probably expect from any international gathering of board gamers: bookish, unkempt, and slightly awkward. There were exceptions to these stereotypes, to be sure. If there was one thing that this particular group of nerds was not, it was nebbish.

“There is a definite amount of social awkwardness that goes along with any kind of gaming. You find the more social breed of gamer in Diplomacy,” said Siobhan Nolen, a hip, 28-year-old history grad student from Northern California and one of the two women entered in this year’s World DipCon. Her red hair wa